The identification industry has undergone many changes over the past few years especially with respect to the use of transponders to track and identify items. RFID systems are well known in the art and are used to encode tags with information for easy retrieval. A so-called smart label is a direct development from the RFID systems that incorporates an integrated circuit coupled with an antenna with read/write capability used to store data for identification and/or tracking. The resulting RFID system has been made small enough to fit into a standard adhesive label without appreciably affecting the thickness of the label.
As an out growth of the smart label industry many attempts have been made to produce printers/devices that were able to print indicia on the surface of the label and encode information to the tag embedded into the label. The printers available on the market today that have the capability to print indicia on the label and encode information on a tag do so either in a non-customized bulk mass method or are inefficient, limited and hard to use. The “mass-producing” printers available today having the capability to print and encode information on a tag were developed for speed and are not capable of producing label lots where each label in the lot has different information encoded on the tag. The thermal printers that are capable of producing smaller lots are very slow, use thermal print technology, and require the user to be highly skilled in programming to use them effectively.
In fields where the label on the package is as important as the material inside the package there is a need for a device that is easy to use that can produce customized RFID stock in such a way that each stock unit in a single lot can have very different information programmed to it and this information once programmed can be verified without extensive human intervention. Since it is well known in the art that increased human intervention in a given process introduces the high chance of mistakes to any process, a device that is able to write information to RFID containing stock and verify information on that RFID tag in stock lots where each individual stock unit has very different information than the other stock unit in the lot that requires only limited human intervention is needed.
One such field where this technology is needed is the Food & Drug Administration (FDA) regulated drug industry, in particular labels used on drugs in clinical trials. In this field there is one absolute when dealing with the FDA or any overseas regulatory authority and it's grounded in common sense: every drug must be correctly labeled and when possible, permanently affixed to the container. Obeying this simple rule doesn't appear at first to be much of a burden. However, add to this equation the following: more and more FDA mandated information must appear on the label, the growth of multi-drug trials, and multi-lingual trials, and it can easily be seen that a device that is capable of mass producing drug labels but is not capable of writing unique information to each RFID tag containing labels is not helpful in this field, especially when some trials only contain as little as 25 containers. Therefore, there is a need for an encoding/verifying device that is able to effectively work with stock containing RFID tags where each stock unit in a given lot may contain different/unique information from the previous stock unit with as little human intervention as possible.
The apparatus of the present invention overcomes the shortcomings of the printers/devices available today and reduces the chance of labeling errors/omissions and thus reduces the chance of clinical drug trial nullification and/or drug recalls due to mislabeling.